The present disclosure relates to a sheet discharge device which is used in image forming apparatuses such as copiers, printers, and facsimile machines and which discharges blank sheets or documents in the form of sheets, and to an image forming apparatus incorporating a sheet discharge device.
In image forming apparatuses using electrophotography, toner is attached to an electrostatic latent image formed on an image carrying member such as a photosensitive drum, and thereby a toner image is formed. The toner image is transferred to a recording medium in the form of a sheet, such as a blank sheet, and then the toner image on the sheet is fixed by a fixing device (fixing portion).
In such an image forming apparatus, a sheet heated and pressed by the fixing device can, depending on conditions, curl greatly. A curled sheet can obstruct a sheet discharge port and greatly humper sheets from being discharged onto a discharge tray in a neat, aligned stack, and can also push a previously stacked sheet in the discharge direction and cause it fall off from the discharge tray.
To avoid that, there have been proposed various methods for decurling a sheet. For example, there is known a sheet conveying device provided with a stiffening member which extends from a nip portion in a discharge roller pair to the upstream side in the sheet discharge direction and which stiffens a sheet by making contact with and pressing it.